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WALKING through the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., after handing in his resignation on Friday, David H. Petraeus passed a bas-relief sculpture of Allen Dulles, who led the agency in the 1950s and early ’60s. Below it is the motto, “His Monument Is Around Us.”

Both men ran the C.I.A. during some of its most active years, Dulles during the early cold war and Mr. Petraeus during the era of drone strikes and counterinsurgency operations. And both, it turns out, had high-profile extramarital affairs.

But private life for a C.I.A. director today is apparently quite different from what it was in the Dulles era. Mr. Petraeus resigned after admitting to a single affair; Allen Dulles had, as his sister, Eleanor, wrote later, “at least a hundred.”

Indeed, the contrast between Dulles’s story and that of Mr. Petraeus reflects how fully the life of public servants has changed in the United States.

Dulles ran the agency from 1953 to 1961, and he had a profound effect on the America’s role in the cold war. Together with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he exercised enormous power and helped overthrow governments from Iran to Guatemala to Congo.

He was also a serial adulterer. Dulles was married in 1920, but he and his wife, Clover, had a difficult home life. She was sensitive and introverted, while he was handsome and charming — and a skilled seducer.

His affairs were legendary. The writer Rebecca West, asked once whether she had been one of his girlfriends, famously replied, “Alas, no, but I wish I had been.”

For most of the 1920 and ’30s, Dulles worked with his brother at the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He often took extended foreign trips, and the letters he wrote home to Clover were full of references to other women that could at best be read as insensitive, at worst as taunting.

In one he wrote of a night out with “an attractive (not beautiful) Irish-French female whom I took to Scheherazade, where we stayed until the early hours.” In another, the subject was a “rather good-looking” English woman with whom he “danced and drank champagne until quite late.”

Other women he reported meeting included “a charming widow,” “a most pleasant companion,” “a young English damsel,” “a very delightful person” and “a sensible soul, also by no means ugly.”

After one Atlantic crossing he proudly wrote to Clover that “on the whole I have kept rather free from any entanglements, and in particular there have been no ladies on board with whom I have particularly consorted.”

As if to pour salt in her emotional wounds, Dulles wrote in another letter that he didn’t “deserve as good a wife as I have, as I am rather too fond of the company of other ladies.”

During World War II, Dulles ran American espionage operations in neutral Switzerland. Soon after arriving in Bern, he found a mistress, Mary Bancroft, a dynamic woman of the world who had grown up on Beacon Hill in Boston under the wing of her doting step-grandfather, C. W. Barron, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Dulles hired Bancroft to write political analysis, but there was little doubt where his interest lay.

“We can let the work cover the romance, and the romance cover the work,” he told her as they began their affair.

By her own account, Bancroft developed “overwhelming admiration for his abilities” and fell “completely in love” with him. Later Dulles introduced her to his wife. Somehow, they became close friends. “I can see how much you and Allen care for one another, and I approve,” the wife told the mistress.

Dulles was 60 years old when he took over the C.I.A., and had slowed down a bit. Nonetheless, he was rumored to have become familiar with one of the highest-profile women of the era, Clare Booth Luce, the wife of Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time and Life (who in turn was said to be keeping company with Mary Bancroft).

Another of Dulles’s conquests, according to several accounts, was Queen Frederika of Greece. In 1958 she came to the United States on a tour with her son, the future King Constantine II, and just as her trip was about to end, she announced without explanation that she would stay for another week.

She came to Washington, discussed “spiritual values” with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office and then visited Dulles at C.I.A. headquarters.

They had been alone in his office for nearly an hour when an aide knocked. Hearing no response, he entered. He found the office empty, but heard noises from the adjoining dressing room. Later Dulles and the queen emerged.

As she was being driven back to the Greek Embassy, the queen suggested one reason Greek-American relations were so strong. “We just love that man!” she exclaimed.

Dulles’s behavior was well known in Washington and elsewhere, but never publicly reported. By the journalistic codes of the 1950s, it was not newsworthy.

The same code applied to Dulles’s superiors. Presidents Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy entrusted the security of the United States to him. What Dulles did in his private life, even when it intersected with his public role, was considered none of their business.

Allen Dulles, who died in 1969, may have been, as one biographer claimed, “the greatest intelligence officer who ever lived.” Yet by today’s standards, this master spy would not have been allowed even to join the C.I.A., much less lead it.

Stephen Kinzer, a former correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.”

*

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